Philosopher and theologian Campanella outlined in his extensive writings an impressive project of social reform and the reconstruction of the entire body of knowledge, seeking to reconcile the heritage of the Renaissance with the principles of the Counter-Reformation and of the new science. The primary focal points of his thought concern not only the philosophy of nature, politics, and religion, but also literature—Campanella is the author of an extraordinary collection of philosophical poetry. The principle that bestows unity and coherence upon the various parts of his complex, pluriform, and multifaceted philosophy is the constant reference to nature which, because it is the expression of rationality and divine truth, Campanella regarded as the ideal model for inspiring reforms in philosophy as well as in social and political structures.

The Early Years . Campanella was born 5 September 1568 in Stilo, Calabria, which was part of the viceroyalty of Naples and governed by the king of Spain. When he was barely fourteen years of age he entered the Dominican Order, which, given his family’s very modest means, afforded him his only opportunity to pursue the studies for which he demonstrated a precocious and remarkable aptitude. In the Calabrian monasteries of the Dominicans he studied the works of Aristotle and his followers, but even in his early youth he was deeply intolerant of them. In his opinion the Peripatetics were too respectful of the authority of their master and were more interested in annotating Aristotle’s books than in investigating firsthand the natural world; in this way, he believed, philosophic research had degenerated into sophistic and sterile disputations. On the other hand, Campanella felt an immediate attraction for the work of Bernardino Telesio. The latter’s De rerum natura iuxta propria principia (1565, 1586; On the nature of things according to its own principles) proposed to seek truth through sensitive experience and the internal principles of nature itself, thus reestablishing the correct connections between “things” and “words.” According to Campanella, the books written by human beings are partial and imperfect copies of the “book of nature,” which, because it was written by God, is the sole depository of absolute truth; human books, therefore, must be continually compared and corrected in the light of the natural book.

The critique of Aristotelian philosophy on the physical, cosmological, and metaphysical levels and the defense of Telesian philosophy—strengthened with topics derived from other philosophies and authors (the pre-Socratics, Plato, Neoplatonism, Hermetism, Pliny’s Natural History)—comprise the contents of Campanella’s first work, Philosophia sensibus demonstrata (1591; Philosophy demonstrated by the senses). In this work of his youth and in later ones, the foundations of the Aristotelian system are demolished and replaced by new Telesian doctrines on such fundamental concepts as space, matter, movement, and the composition of celestial bodies. The work was published in Naples, a city where Campanella often met with Giambattista della Porta, one of the most famous proponents of the tradition of natural magic. But the young monk’s adherence to the philosophy of Telesio rather than to scholastic and Aristotelian doctrines aroused the suspicions of theologians. Although he was imprisoned in 1592, Campanella was acquitted of the accusations against him, after which he went first to Rome and then to Florence and Bologna, where the manuscripts of his works were seized by emissaries of the Inquisition.

Settling in Padua, he met Galileo, a friend whom he would always hold in esteem. Unfortunately, Campanella was to face further and more perilous judiciary problems: In October 1594 he was incarcerated in the prison of the Holy Office in Rome. Forced to abjure “for most grave suspicion of heresy,” at the end of 1597 Campanella was ordered back to Calabria, and in the summer of 1598, at nearly thirty years of age and after having been away for a decade, Campanella found himself once more in Stilo. Here he would become involved in the most dramatic events of his life, events that would influence the rest of his career. Prophetic and astrological texts, natural and heavenly signs, but especially conditions of serious social and political disorder in Calabria, persuaded Campanella that, as the century drew toward its end, a period of radical changes was approaching. He thus became the leader of a broad conspiracy that proposed to free the province from the tyranny of the king of Spain and to transform it into a republic founded on natural and rational principles. Betrayed to the Spanish authorities by two of its accomplices, the conspiracy was crushed at birth by an army sent at the order of the viceroy. Accused of the double crime of lèse-majesté and of heresy, Campanella avoided the death penalty only by feigning madness; he spent the next twenty-seven years in Neapolitan prisons.

Natural Philosophy . During his long years of imprisonment and under very harsh living conditions, Campanella devoted himself to composing his most important works. In them, nature plays a principal role even in the religious and political fields. In Ateismo trionfato (Atheism vanquished; Rome, 1631, and Paris, 1636) for example, Campanella set out to prove that religion is not a human invention, not a useful trick dreamed up by priests and princes in order to seize and maintain power, as the followers of Machiavelli and the “reason of State” affirmed; on the contrary, Campanella asserted, it is a virtus naturalis (natural power) intrinsic in mankind and in even the smallest aspect of nature. As for his political thought, early in his incarceration Campanella composed his most famous work, the Città del Sole (City of the Sun, 1623). The ideal city is presented as a “body of the republic” in which the individual members are part of a unified organism and contribute to the welfare of all. In order to avoid the errors and injustice of existing societies, Campanella founded his “philosophic city” on natural principles, such as an equitable division of labor based on the capabilities and the inclinations of the individuals; communal ownership of wealth; attention to procreation (eugentic norms); education available to all and made easier and more pleasant through images painted on the walls of the buildings that would gird the city in seven circles. The work was issued in Latin translation in the corpus of the Philosophia realis, published in Frankfurt in 1623 by Tobias Adami, a German scholar who had come into contact with the prisoner in Naples. Political reflection is a constant feature of the thought of Campanella, who in other texts treated themes relating to the prospect of a universal monarchy and of the reunification of humanity in “a single flock under a single shepherd”; in the Monarchia di Spagna(Monarchy of Spain, 1640), he emphasized the providential role of the Catholic king who, like the biblical Cyrus, has the duty to unite people in a single faith.

A prominent aspect of Campanella’s philosophy of nature is natural magic, elaborated with particular effectiveness in De sensu rerum et magia (On the sense of things and on magic, 1620), in which Campanella expounded his vision of the natural world, considered as an organism whose individual parts are invested with life and sensitivity. Every natural being tends toward self-preservation, and to this end it is endowed, in differing degrees, with “sense,” that is to say feelings and a capacity to distinguish what is useful for its own life and that should be sought and pursued, from what is perceived as destructive and that one should avoid and flee. In animal organisms the cognitive and vital functions are connected with the spiritus, the warm, wafting, pliant breath issuing from matter rendered extremely tenuous by the heat of the sun. It resides in the brain and, passing through very thin nerve channels, comes into contact, by means of the sensory organs, with the exhalations, motions, and light that exude from external objects; all its passions and knowledge arise from the modifications that the spiritus undergoes. In Book IV of the De sensu rerum, Campanella reinterpreted the tradition of natural magic in the light of the doctrine of the sense of things and of the spiritus. The magician is he who understands the sense inherent in each being and is capable of inducing certain alterations and passions into the spiritus. He knows how to activate the vital forces by suggesting appropriate foods, beverages, climates, sounds, and herbal and animal remedies; he understands the secrets of procreation and of illnesses; and he can explain natural divinations and the prophecies of dreams or the changes in those bitten by a rabid dog or by tarantulas, changes effected by the spread and the domination in their organism of the “spirit” of the animal that attacked them. The spiritus and its passions also play a central role in the Medicina (1653; Medicine), in which Campanella, revisiting some themes of Hippocrates and especially of Marsilio Ficino, defined medicine as “a kind of magical practice” (quaedam magica praxis) dedicated to avoiding or caring for illnesses through a knowledge of all human aspects—physical, psychological, emotional, and environmental.

Campanella’s relations with Galileo occupied a central role in his thought. Campanella showed a steadfast interest in the astronomical and scientific discoveries of the scientist, even if he often did not agree with his positions, especially those that touched upon atomism. The most important text of this friendship is the Apologia pro Galileo (A defense of Galileo), written in 1616 and published in Frankfurt in 1622. In this work, which demonstrates his deep competence in theology, Campanella does not defend personal philosophic doctrines: his image of nature as a living organism is very far from that of Galileo, according to whom nature is a book written in mathematic characters; moreover, the heliocentric doctrine is scarcely compatible with Telesian physics, which maintains that the Sun is the locus of heat and the origin of movement, while Earth is the seat of cold and the prime cause of immobility and weight. Campanella’s intention is to support the libertas philosophandi (freedom of thought) of Galileo whose fundamental right and duty is to give priority to the reading of the book of nature over that of the book of men. The discoveries of Galileo do not create a crisis in theological principles, even though Aristotelian philosophy, regarded as an erroneous reading of the book of nature, must be substituted by a different philosophy more in harmony with the new celestial phenomena.

Later Years . Campanella was released from the prison at Castel Nuovo on 23 May 1626 and then transferred to the palace of the Inquisition in Rome. The most sensational episode of his Roman sojourn is the one involving the forecasts of astrologers who predicted the imminent death of Pope Urban VIII because of unpropitious dispositions of the stars. Campanella had written a treatise on astrology, seeking to free it from Arab superstitions and to base it on natural principles. Aligning himself with the position of Thomas Aquinas, he maintained that the stars exercise an influence on the corporal spiritus and its passions, while the will and human reason remain free. Summoned by the pope, Campanella, hoping to avoid the perils of an eclipse, engaged in the practice of natural and stellar magic as advocated by Ficino and described by Campanella in his booklet De siderali fato vitando (How to avoid the fate destined by the stars). The publication of this pamphlet as the seventh book of the Astrologicorum libri (1629) caused a great scandal, for it risked compromising the pope himself in accusations of superstitious practices. To allay all suspicions, Urban VIII decided to act decisively against astrologers: in 1630 he ordered imprisonment for Orazio Morandi, in whose convent of Saint Praxedes the practice of astrology was enmeshed with political intrigues; Morandi died after a few months in prison, with poisoning suspected as the cause of death. In 1631 the pope promulgated the extremely harsh Papal Bull, Inscrutabilis, against astrology and every form of divination.

In 1634, again for political reasons, Campanella was forced to seek refuge in Paris, where he busied himself with the publication of his Opere (Works). Besides a second edition of Atheismus triumphatus (and other minor texts), 1636, and a second edition of De sensu rerum et magia (1636 and 1637), Campanella edited in Paris three volumes of his Opera omnia: the Philosophia realis (1637), the Philosophia rationalis (1638), and the monumental Metaphysica (1638). He also began once more to write political texts in order to demonstrate how France, difficulties and setbacks notwithstanding, was in an ascendant phase of “increasing fortune,” while the Spanish-Hapsburg powers were experiencing the descending parabola of an inexorable decline. His last work was an eclogue in Latin hexameters celebrating the birth of the future Louis XIV, the Sun King, an event that occurred on Campanella’s seventieth birthday. Turning again to the astrological and prophetic themes so dear to him, in these verses he foresaw the approach of a new epoch in which peace, justice, and harmony would prevail among men. He died at dawn on 21 May 1639.

SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY

Luigi Firpo, Bibliografia degli scritti di Tommaso Campanella (Turin: V. Bona, 1940) is the only available work offering a comprehensive description of Campanella’s works. Subsequent editions of his works can be found in John M. Headley, Tommaso Campanella and the Transformation of the World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), and the journal Bruniana & Campelliana (1995–).

OTHER SOURCES

Amabile, Luigi. Fra Tommaso Campanella, la sua congiura, i suoi processi e la sua pazzia. 3 vols. Naples, Italy: Morano, 1882. Because of their generous documentation, these volumes (and the two cited Amabile volumes below) constitute the point of departure for scholarly studies on the life and thought of Campanella.

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Campanella, Tommaso

CAMPANELLA, TOMMASO

Campanella. the son of Geronimo and Catarinella Martello Campanella, showed remarkable intellectual ability at a very early age. In 158 2. inspired by the lives of Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus, he entered the Dominican order, where his name was changed from Giovan Domenico to Tomaso, by which he has been known since. After his early philosophical studies, based on Aristotle, Campanilla moved to the Dominican house at Cosenza in 1588 to study theology. There he read Telesio’s De rerum nature in the 1570 edition, a work that remained a dominant influence for the remainder of his life. Telesis’s work led him to publish Philosophic sensibus demonstrate (written 1589, published 1591) in response to G. A. Mar-ta’sPugnaculum Aristotelis ad versus principia B. Telesii (Rome, 1587). In 1589 Campanella went to Naples, where he met Giambattista della Porta and a Jewish astrologer named Abraham. He became active in della Porta’s group, participating in its protoexperimentalism; through Abraham he became acquainted with the astrological and pseudo-scientific traditions, which were important factors in his later thought. During this time he put forward his Telesian views more and more openly.

In May 1592 Campanella was denounced to the Inquisition for heresy and was confined to the Convent of San Domenico. Thus began a long series of imprisonments, trials, tortures, and other punishments that ended only with his release in 1629. His internment, in Naples (1599 - 1626) and in Rome (1626–1629), was sometimes under the most brutal conditions, while at other times he was allowed a certain degree of freedom for writing, reading, having visitors, and teaching. During these years Campanella continued his studies as far as was possible, and a number of manuscripts were smuggled out of prison to be published in Germany. They could not be issued in Italy, owing to the regulations imposed by the Inquisition.

After Campanella had had several years of partial freedom in Rome, the Inquisition discovered a plot in Naples (1634) by one of Campanella’s followers and Campanella was implicated. He fled Rome before he could be arrested, reaching Aix-en-Provence in November 1634; there he was enthusiastically received by Peiresc and Gassendi, who had known of him and his work for some years. A few months later Campanella arrived in Paris, There Cardinal Richelieu came to his aid and helped him in various ways for the rest of his life, and he was also received at the court of Louis XIII. Finally accorded the honor he had been denied in Italy for so long, Campanella spent his last years writing and preparing for the press numerous works, which could be published in France with official approval. He died in the Dominican convent on Rue St.-Honoré and was buried in the adjoining Church of the Annunciation, which was destroyed during the Revolution (1795).

Campanella’s writings cover a wide range of subjects. Although perhaps best known for work on political philosophy (Civitas solis) and metaphysics, he also wrote on most of the other branches of the comprehensive seventeenth-century philosophy cursus. The early attraction to Telesian science was never lost, and was reinforced by an attachment to Renaissance Neoplatonism and contact with della Porta’s brand of experimentalism and magic. Although trained as a Dominican, Campanella very early recognized the limitations of Aristotelian philosophy and science, and a strong anti-Aristotelian tendency can be seen throughout his works.

Telesio’s De return natura must be seen as the foundation stone of Campanula’s thought (although not the only one). From it he derived a number of key principles, such as the reduction of active forces operating in the universe to those of heat and cold, and the conception of a void space in which natural events take place. Although Telesio’s empirical view was still emphasized and reinforced by his contacts with the Neapolitan pro-toexperimentalists, Campanlla also grafted strong theological and metaphysical elements onto it. Like Ficino and others before him, he viewed man as composed of the triad body-spiritus-soul. This position gave him scope to place man in a macrocosm-microcosm framework in which the use of magic and astrology could play a central interpretive role. Although scholars disagree somewhat on the precise extent to which magic influenced Campanella’s thought, there is no doubt that it had a significant place. Like Ficino, but unlike Telesio, his world view allowed a key position to astrology and pseudoscience, as evidenced by works such as De sensu rerum et magia (1620) and Astrologi- corum libri VII (1629). The latter work shows that Campanella acted as a consultant for Pope Urban VIII in astrological matters.

In addition to his interests in the astrological side of stellar phenomena. Campanella was a sup-porter of the Copernican system as defended by Galileo. In several works, principally the Apologia pro Galilaeo (1622), he sided with the embattled Florentine, not only in supporting the Copernican theory but also on broader issues, including those involving the competing claims of religion and science. Like Galileo, Campanella held that natural truth was not revealed in Scripture, but in the physical world. Thus the study of natural phenomena was seen as an important step toward theological understanding. Science and theology were to be clearly distinguished, however; both led to an understanding of God, who had revealed Himself in two books (codices), Nature and Scripture. While Galileo was essentially satisfied with an understanding of natural, physical reality, Campanella endeavored to go beyond this and to find the ultimate metaphysical truth of things. Again like Galileo, Campanella stressed –unfortunately for him, counter to the dominant opinion of his fellow Italians–the necessity of a libertas philosophandi. He was perhaps the first to use this particular formulation, later popularized by Spinoza and others.

Campanula’s writings encompass a very broad range of scientific topics, and he must be viewed as one of the important systematizers of the seventeenth century. Iconoclastic and antitraditional, he attempted to provide a new system of natural knowledge based on the empirical, Neoplatonic, and astrological traditions at his disposal. While scientific knowledge played a more important role in his thought than most interpreters have admitted, it was basically subjugated to his very strong metaphysical and theological orientation, which aimed for ultimate causal explanations of physical phenomena. Thus Campanula’s importance in the history of science was not so much through his own scientific discoveries as through his animistic. yet empirical, interpretation of the world, which influenced a number of contemporaries and successors.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works Campanella’s output was voluminous. Owing to the circumstances of his life, many of his writings were destroyed; others were rewritten several times in various forms ; some were circulated or even published without his knowledge; and others remained hidden until recent times. All of this makes for a very confusing state of affairs that is impossible to cover briefly yet in detail. For a thorough treatment see L. Firpo, Bibliografia degli scritti di Tommaso Campanella (Turin, 1940), and his biographical article cited below.

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Tommaso Campanella

Tommaso Campanella

The Italian philosopher, political theorist, and poet Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639) was persecuted for his attempts to achieve utopian reforms.

Giovanni Domenico Campanella was born at Stilo in Calabria on Sept. 5, 1568; he assumed the name Tommaso when he entered the Dominican order about 1583. In Naples he made his first contact with the anti-Aristotelian doctrines of Bernardino Telesio. In 1592, after his first ecclesiastical trial, he was sentenced to return to his province and to abandon his Telesian sympathies. Campanella instead set out for the north, sojourning briefly in Rome, Florence, Bologna, and Padua. Between 1593 and 1595 he suffered several minor trials and periods of imprisonment on a number of charges.

After Campanella was released from prison in 1595, he passed the next few years in apparent quiet in a small monastery at Stilo. But this was actually a period of febrile secret activity. Campanella became the head of a conspiracy to overthrow the despotic Spanish rule of impoverished southern Italy and replace it with a theocratic republic, with himself as supreme priest and king. The plot was savagely repressed, and in 1602 he was sentenced to perpetual imprisonment. The subsequent 24 years of Campanella's life were spent in the bowels of various Neapolitan dungeons.

Despite discomforts and privations, this was a period of incredible literary productivity for Campanella, and many of his major works (the Metaphysica, the Monarchia Messiae, the Atheismus triumphatus, the Apologia pro Galileo, and others) date from this period. His best-known work, Civitas solis (The City of the Sun), was completed in 1623. This utopian work was based on Plato's Republic, and it presented Campanella's principal political ideal— universal theocratic monarchy, with its supreme head either the pope or the Spanish king. Regardless of who the ruler might be, the underlying principle remained constant: peace and well-being were impossible without unity.

In 1626, by order of the Spanish viceroy, Campanella was released from prison. When he reached Rome, he was imprisoned by the Pope but was soon freed. But the Curia's opposition to him because of his open defense of Galileo and his outspoken views, together with Spanish hostility, rendered his position in Rome precarious. Fearing further persecution, he fled from Rome in October 1634 and found refuge in France, where he was warmly welcomed in scholarly circles and at court. His central occupation now became the publication in 10 volumes of his writings, many of which had never appeared in print, while others had previously been brought out in unauthorized editions. This project was interrupted by Campanella's death on May 22, 1639.

Further Reading

The best comprehensive study of Campanella in English is Bernardine M. Bonansea, Tommaso Campanella: Renaissance Pioneer of Modern Thought (1969). It includes a good bibliography of the primary and secondary literature, with a listing of the writings by Campanella that are available in English translation. □

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Campanella, Tommaso

The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed.

Copyright The Columbia University Press

Tommaso Campanella (tōm–mä´zō kämpänĕl´lä), 1568–1639, Italian Renaissance philosopher and writer. He entered the Dominican order at the age of 15, and although he was frequently in trouble with the authorities, he never left the church. Imprisoned in 1599 on the grounds that he was plotting against the Spanish rule of Naples, he was released in 1626 on the representation of Pope Urban VIII. His best-known work is Civitas solis (1623, tr. The City of the Sun), an account of a utopian society that closely follows the pattern of Plato's Republic. Although he retained much of scholasticism and insisted on the preeminence of faith in matters of theology, he emphasized perception and experiment as the media of science. His importance, like that of Francis Bacon and Bruno, depends largely on his anticipation of what came to be the scientific attitude of empiricism. For his Civitas solis, see Henry Morley, ed., Ideal Commonwealths (1890).

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